Biography

Artur Smolyaninov (born 27 October 1983) is a Russian stage and screen actor, as well as a musician. He is best known for his leading role as Oleg Lutaev in Fyodor Bondarchuk’s war drama The 9th Company (2005), and for his work in international productions such as The Darkest Hour (2011) and Redirected (2014), and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur (2026), in which he played a bit part. Smolyaninov was born on 27 October 1983 in Moscow and grew up in a creative family: his mother was a painter and art teacher, and his father taught music. He was drawn into movies almost by chance when, at fourteen, he was cast in Valery Priemykhov’s Who If Not Us (1998), a performance that won him a best teenage actor prize at the Artek International Film Festival. At sixteen he entered the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (RATI-GITIS) in Leonid Kheifets’s workshop, graduating in 2004 with roughly a dozen screen credits already behind him. Wider recognition came with The 9th Company, in which he played the orphaned soldier known as Lyuty ("The Fierce"). The role became his signature and brought him the MTV-Russia movie award and the Triumph Prize in 2006. From 2006 to 2022 he was a member of the Moscow Sovremennik Theatre company. His screen career expanded across Russian television and movies, including Heat (2006), 1612 (2007), Nirvana (2008), Burnt by the Sun 2 (2010), and the series The White Guard (2012). In 2022 Smolyaninov publicly condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and left Russia, living first in Latvia and later obtaining Israeli citizenship. In January 2023 the Russian Ministry of Justice added him to its register of “foreign agents,” and in 2026 a Moscow court sentenced him in absentia to eight years in a penal colony. Since his exile he has continued to work in European productions, including a film shot in Estonia, and has hosted a Russian-language vodcast for Deutsche Welle.